With my book-length history of community radio WFHB edging so near completion that I can taste it, I’m spiraling off on a related tangent to write a piece for the Limestone Post on an odd little moment in the station’s history.
And, by the way, the Limestone Post itself is fixing to celebrate its 10th year of existence. To that end, I’m having executive editor Dason Anderson on my WFHB interview program, Big Talk, next month, so stayed tuned.
The LP story will recount the time a local radio pirate threw a monkey wrench into the works and sabotaged Bloomington Community Radio, Inc.’s second attempt to gain an FCC license. BCR was the third and current moniker for the nonprofit corporation hell-bent on starting a community radio station hereabouts. A motley pair of roommates had come up with the crazy idea in the summer of 1975. It took them and others nearly two decades to get WFHB off the ground.
Correction: the two, Mark Hood and Jeffrey Morris, were actually garagemates. They lived in a converted garage behind Jack Gilfoy’s recording studio on the then-outskirts of Bloomington. Hood was Gilfoy’s chief engineer and Morris did a lot of electrical and handyman work for the studio. The two didn’t always have a TV so they listened to Michael Bourne‘s eclectic WFIU afternoon music program and, in the evening, they’d tune their old clunky receiver to WWL, a clear-channel, 50,000-watt powerhouse out of New Orleans. WWL back in the mid-1970s was big with long-haul truckers and featured such countrified luminaries as Red Sovine and the Carter Family. One record Hood and Morris heard again and again was Sovine’s 1965 hit, “Giddyup Go,” a spoken-word ditty telling the tale of a truck driver father and his estranged son sharing an emotional reunion at a truck stop.
Hood and Morris would never have heard “Giddyup Go” on Bloomington radio in the mid-1970s, nor would they have heard anything other than commercial pop proffered by whichever Indianapolis Top 40 station could come in clear enough to be heard. Michael Bourne’s WFIU program was so good he had to pack up and move to New York City where he became a legendary radio personality on WGBO. Bloomington 50 years ago was almost a radio desert. “Bloomington radio basically sucked,” says WFHB’s first general manager, Brian Kearney, of the local AM/FM scene.
BCR was readying its second FCC application (its first had been denied in 1981) in the mid-1980s. Kearney, who was BCR president at the time, and the rest of the founding crew were confident they could get their station on the air before the ’80s were out. It didn’t work out that way, though. Local radio pirate Bruce Quinn filed a competing application with the FCC and, surprisingly, won. If you’re hot for details on the Bruce Quinn Affair, you’ll have to click on over to the LP next month.
Anyway, pirate radio, or broadcasting without an FCC license. That Bruce Quinn fellow would set up his turntables, mic, and transmitter in his living room or that of a sympathetic friend or supporter and crank out a weak signal, irregularly, in the evening, playing records not heard on any other Bloomington station. He was a radio pirate and every time he flipped the on/off switch on his transmitter, he risked prosecution, fines, and seizure of his equipment by the FCC.
Pirate radio has been in existence since the very first governmental agency established regulations and licensing for the AM/FM spectrum. It reached its zenith in the 1960s with “border blasters” (think of Wolfman Jack at XERF/XERB, mega-powered AM stations just over the Mexican border, the Wolfman’s voice reaching far into the United States) or the UK’s many, storied unlicensed stations emanating from ships in international waters (see the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie Pirate Radio, aka in the UK The Boat That Rocked).
It’s not so much of a thing anymore, what with the emergence of internet streaming. Hell, anybody on Earth can hear my voice any time of the day or night even though my show airs Thursdays at 5:30pm. People who, for whatever reason, once eschewed the FCC route (or whichever authority regulates the airwaves in their country) can now transmit their voices, their music, their opinions, their ideas, and (mostly) their nonsense around the globe so why go pirate?
There just might be good reason to go pirate in the coming years. Now that Li’l Duce (or Caligu-lite or the Mad King) has led the charge to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is paving the way for his select group of billionaire cohorts to take over every single freaking media outlet on the planet, there will be vanishingly fewer opportunities for people to dissent, to protest, to air contrary opinions, to be weird, and to let the world know about it.
With many of those same few billionaire cohorts owning internet social media empires, posting about, say, 2027’s No Kings Rally may well be next to impossible.
There may come a day when the only folks able to let the world know about ICE’s evils, MAGA’s manias, QAnon’s canards, or any of today’s other democracy-snuffing goings-on will be radio pirates in their dens or living rooms, using vintage transmitters, sending unlicensed signals throughout their neighborhoods. Pirates, in other words.